Priorities!!

Bedbugs

Good night
Sleep tight
Don’t let the bedbugs bite

Yeah well let me tell you a thing or two about bedbugs. New York, that is where it all happened. I am in bed in my hotel room with my three sleeping children in the bed next to mine, and I am watching a movie on my computer when out of the corner of my eye I see a small bug crawling on my pillow. Well I brush it away and don’t think much of it, bugs are around now and then…no big deal.

In the morning I have several large bites on the back of my shoulders, and as the morning goes on more and more big red bites keep showing up. The itching is starting to drive me crazy. So I figure it must be bed bugs. This was a three night stay so I switched to a new room for the second night, but by then it was too late. I had over a hundred bites show up by evening. And these bites were turning into huge welt like hives. By the middle of the next day I ended up going to a walk in clinic because I was starting to react to the hundred some odd bites. Three medications later I am doing much better. Lucky for my kids I was the only one attacked. So far that is my one and only experience with bedbugs and I really would like it to be my last.

Kick and Run

You hear of cars hitting pedestrians but how often do you hear of, or see, a pedestrian hit a car? We were on our bus, stopped at a red light, downtown Montreal. On the other side of the intersection there is a person crossing the street on a don’t walk sign and a car comes along to make a right turn on their green light. But this takes the car in the path of the person crossing the street. This is when the pedestrian decides to kick the car as it is passing by because he is mad at it. That is right…He kicks the car and hits it as well. So the car stops and the driver and the pedestrian start yelling at each other. Eventually the lights all change and they both have to get out of the way. I was truly amazed. The pedestrian was in the wrong, yet he still had the nerve to attack the car!

Our Last JOH Show

We are coming to an end of our Journey of Hope theater tour. Tomorrow is our last concert. It is a bitter sweet end to this part of our trip. On one hand it will be nice to change the pace of things by switching back to our church show, and to have a bit more of a predictable schedule. The bitter part is that we are having to say good bye to many of our team members. Because they are here specifically for the theater show they are now all going their own ways in just a couple days. It will be quite sad to see them all go, they are all good friends. We have worked hard together, and shared many laughs and good times together.

Coffeeville

I think this is where I would like to go and live!!!
Just go and sit and drink coffee all day.

Spelling Test

One of the Aunties gave a spelling test in her English class and then later showed me one of the tests. At the top of the paper Spelling Test had been written out nicely...only it was spelled,

sppling test

Times Zones and Salt

I am quite excited because today is the last time for a couple weeks that we are changing time zones. The last number of weeks we have been changing between Central and Eastern time a couple times a week.

On a completely different note, this evening I had the most salty chips in the world. They were saltier than 10 salty things! They kind of made my lips get sucked back into my head and dry up into nothing. And you may think I am making this up, but no I am not, even my friends at the table with me were wiping off each chip before eating them. That is a lot of salt! You may be asking why we kept eating them? Well sometimes a person just wants chips and salsa.

Michigan

Right now we are in the upper top of Michigan, the part above the Michigan Mitten part. Traveling long distances on a bus is a curious thing when it comes to the weather. We get on the bus in one place where it is perhaps a wee bit chilly, but not cold. And when we get off the bus we are surrounded by snow, frozen rivers, ski hills, ice covering the parking lots, and snow mobiles everywhere. So out comes all the layers of clothes, hats, scarves, gloves, etc. Knowing that probably by next week we will be putting them all away because we will once again be needed a wardrobe change to accommodate the next states weather.

This is what I see when I look out my hotel window.

Lord / Jackfruit

We had a bunch of extra time this evening before bed time, so I asked my three girls that I am staying with to teach me one of our Luganda worship songs. I already know quite a few of them and enjoy singing what I can during our devotion time, but every time I join a new choir there are yet more new songs to learn. So Florence starts taking me through a song nice a slow so I can get all the different words, and as we are singing along all three of the girls start laughing till they are falling on the floor. They tell me between bursts of laughter that instead of singing "the name of the Lord shall be praised" I am singing about jackfruit. ...sooooo I guess I was not saying it quite right, but I got it in the end...I think. Florence says she is going to test me in the morning.

Safety

Safety First,
I always say!!

Salad Is Not Real Food

We go to buffets quite often. And a couple times now I have just gone for the salad bar and fixed myself a big, grand, salad. Twice now it has happened where I bring my salad back to my table, and the kids I am sitting with look at my heaping plate in amazement and ask me “But Auntie aren’t you going to get food?!” I look at my salad which is big enough to be my entire meal, and tell them that I have a huge plate full of food. But they insist that I have not taken any real food. They point to their plates filled with chicken, mashed potatoes, fries, and a variety of other such stuff and tell me that they have food but I do not. So at the end of a meal when I am completely full from my salad they are all still amazed because I did not eat any food for dinner. (can you tell how fond they are of salad!)

Jacky

Friday January 30, 2008 Jacky passed away.
She was one of my children from the children’s home I helped out at in Uganda. Yes she had AIDS but she was a healthy child for the most part. She was a happy, fun loving little girl. But a number of days ago she became sick and ended up in the hospital. There were complications with the blood transfusions she received, and her forth day in the hospital she went home to be with the Lord. Although I was only at the children’s home for a month and a half I still feel very attached to those children. There is something about spending all day every day with them, taking them to the clinic every day, giving them their medications, playing with them, holding the little ones as they fall asleep, taking them for walks, and giving them all the love possible because they do not receive it in the other parts of their lives. They called me Mummy and I felt like it. And now one of my children is gone. Gone for reasons I cannot explain, she was only 9 years old, and she lived and died from a sickness that was in no way her fault.

Departing

After the last couple weeks of staying at our base house we are now on the road. This first stop is a couple days of staging our show and getting it ready for our concerts. Although it is always nice to be in one place and in our own home it is also nice to be on the road again. We went to church this morning, then headed out right from there, we also picked up two new Aunties at the airport that are joining our team. It is a great team, lots of fun people, and great kids. I would write more but it has been a long day and my brain has now stopped working.

One Bum

I was on the bus on the way to church, sitting between two boys. Godfrey is twisted around not sitting properly on his seat, so I ask him:

Is your bum on your seat?

He hold up one finger as says

One is

The Large Things In Life

“It’s a mistake to think it’s the small things we control and not the large, it’s the other way around! We can’t stop the small accident, the tiny detail that conspires into fate: the extra moment you run back for something forgotten, a moment that saves you from an accident – or causes one. But we can assert the largest order, the large human values daily, the only order large enough to see.”

From the book Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels

An Uncheery Subject

I had a rather interesting conversation with a friend last night and it has left me wondering about myself, human nature, the laws of God and man, and how desperation will cause you to make choices you would not normally make.

The question posed (which stemmed from us watching the evening news) was “Do you agree with torture?”

Well my first response was a great big, NO it is never ok. Now although most countries will not admit it, I do think that every government tortures individuals to get the information they want, and the world is a better place for it. I know it happens but I do not want to know about it.

Now it is one thing when we are talking about terrorists and countries being invaded and people being blown up, it would seem that for the greater good the information should be extracted from the individual in order to save a greater number of people. Does that give us the right to do horrible horrible things to another human? But we also brought it down to the level of would we think torture is ok if it was just the safety of our families involved.

Through the conversation I stubbornly suck to the fact that it is not ok, and I would never think it was ok under any circumstances…but here I am a day later still wondering. I hate people being hurt, and I hate the ugly side of life. I know that some people make those decisions and are ok with that, but I am just not one of those people. I do not like violence. Is it possible for me to say, it is not ok with me, but at the same time I know it happens and with that I am ok with as long as I do not know about it. I know that is rather two-faced but that is how I feel about it.

Jasper

I went to Jasper Alberta with my friend Jessica. We had a great time walking through a canyon on a frozen river. I have never seen anything like it. The canyon walls going so high up above and beautiful frozen waterfalls all around. Half way through our walk it started to snow big fluffy snowflakes, it was quite magical. There was also a cave like place that had snow crystals growing down from the ceiling, once again I have never seen anything like it. I tried to take pictures but it really did not do any of it justice.




We also went to a lake and did some snowshoeing around on it. We were the only people in the world. It was one of those places that you can hear the silence and the wind rushing through the mountains that surrounded us. It is times like these that I can so easily see how big God is, how amazing He is, and how He is eternity. It is so easy to get wrapped up in life and think all my problems are such a big deal, but then I stop and look at the amazing creation of God and wonder why I worry. If God is so great as to make something so breath taking then surely he can take care of me and my little life.

Rats

So the other morning I got up and came down to the kitchen and stopped short as I find on the kitchen counter a box of rat poison and a pellet gun. The cat food is all put up on the counter and I realize that all the bedroom doors were shut (which they are usually not). At this point I start to freak out, WHY is there rat poison and a gun in the kitchen!!!!!

Here is the story. That night at 2:30am my mom realized that she had forgot to put out the garbage for garbage day. She opens the back door to get the get the garbage can and when she grabs it she feels like she touched something that was not quite right but does not see anything. Well let this be a lesson to everyone!! If you touch something funny feeling in the dark, Run Away! Because the second time of grabbing the garbage can brought a big fat rat, about 9 inches in body length, running up her arm. It dropped off half way up and ran into our kitchen to disappear. My moms screaming brought both my brother running (I slept through it all). So at 2:30 in the morning Jesse goes to the store to get rat poison, and Casey brings out his pellet gun to gun down the big fat rat.

The whole next day I go creeping around scared to death that it is going to come out and attack me. I made Jesse bring me a broom so I could defend myself before I was willing to climb down off the chair. And better yet we taped a butcher knife to the other end of the broom. So no worries, I had my weapon to keep myself safe, because I was sure it was going to come after me.

The next night we set traps, and lucky for us it got itself trapped. So no more rat to come after me and kill me. It is ok folks, I am ok!

2009

Welcome 2009. I know the new year is suppose to be a big deal with goals and such, but I have to say I have never really gotten into the whole New Year thing. New Years comes and goes and life continues to plod along in the same manner it always has, bringing its ups and downs, and small to large new adventures around the many corners that we turn in life. Now I do indeed look forward to the new years that come, and I always appreciate the years that we have finished, but that is about it. So this is me, rather nonchalantly saying, welcome 2009, may you be what you be.